Pioneers of the Old Southwest by Constance Skinner

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This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on thewritings and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers,such as Doddridge and Adair, and on the public documents of theperiod as printed in the Colonial Records and in the AmericanArchives. But the author is, nevertheless, greatly indebted tothe researches of, other writers, whose works are cited in theBibliographical Note. The author's thanks are due, also, to Dr.Archibald Henderson, of the University of North Carolina, for hiskindness in reading the proofs of this book for comparison withhis own extended collection of unpublished manuscripts relatingto the period.

C. L. S.

April, 1919.

CONTENTS

I. THE TREAD OF PIONEERSII. FOLKWAYSIII. THE TRADERIV. THE PASSING OF THE FRENCH PERILV. BOONE, THE WANDERERVI. THE FIGHT FOR KENTUCKYVII. THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND VIII. TENNESSEEIX. KING'S MOUNTAINX. SEVIER, THE STATEMAKERXI. BOONE'S LAST DAYSBIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Pioneers Of The Old Southwest

Chapter I. The Tread Of Pioneers

The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history hasascribed the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the OldSouthwest, began their migrations to America in the latter yearsof the seventeenth century. It is not known with certaintyprecisely when or where the first immigrants of their racearrived in this country, but soon after 1680 they were to befound in several of the colonies. It was not long, indeed, beforethey were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia andwere making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities inthe New World. By 1726 they had established settlements inseveral counties behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they hadbegun their great trek southward through the Shenandoah Valley ofVirginia and on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. Therethey met others of their own race--bold men like themselves,hungry after land--who were coming in through Charleston andpushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the "BackCountry," in search of homes.

These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in theshaping of society; they had already made history. Theirostensible object in America was to obtain land, but, like mostexternal aims, it was secondary to a deeper purpose. What hadsent the Ulstermen to America was a passion for a whole freedom.They were lusty men, shrewd and courageous, zealous to the deathfor an ideal and withal so practical to the moment in businessthat it soon came to be commonly reported of them that "they keptthe Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on,"though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is currentwherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and witharms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights.They were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood andcraft of border warfare through years of guerrilla fighting withthe Irish Celts. They had pitted and proved their strengthagainst a wilderness; they had reclaimed the North of Irelandfrom desolation. For the time, many of them were educated men;under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church every child wastaught to read at an early age, since no person could be admittedto the privileges of the Church who did not both understand andapprove the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They werebrought up on the Bible and on the writings of their famouspastors, one of whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance tothe democratic doctrine that "men are called to themagistracy by the suffrage of the people whom they govern, andfor men to assume unto themselves power is mere tyranny andunjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and inresisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings tointerfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulsterhad already declared for democracy.

It was shortly after James VI of Scotland became James I ofEngland and while the English were founding Jamestown that theScots had first occupied Ulster; but the true origin of theUlster Plantation lies further back, in the reign of Henry VIII,in the days of the English Reformation. In Henry's Irish realmthe Reformation, though proclaimed by royal authority, had neverbeen accomplished; and Henry's more famous daughter, Elizabeth,had conceived the plan, later to be carried out by James, ofplanting colonies of Protestants in Ireland to promote loyalty inthat rebellious land. Six counties, comprising half a millionacres, formed the Ulster Plantation. The great majority of thecolonists sent thither by James were Scotch Lowlanders, but amongthem were many English and a smaller number of Highlanders. Thesethree peoples from the island of Britain brought forth, throughintermarriage, the Ulster Scots.

The reign of Charles I had inaugurated for the Ulstermen an eraof persecution. Charles practically suppressed the Presbyterianreligion in Ireland. His son, Charles II, struck at Ireland in1666 through its cattle trade, by prohibiting the exportation ofbeef to England and Scotland. The Navigation Acts, excludingIreland from direct trade with the colonies, ruined Irishcommerce, while Corporation Acts and Test Acts requiringconformity with the practices of the Church of England boreheavily on the Ulster Presbyterians.

It was largely by refugees from religious persecution thatAmerica in the beginning was colonized. But religious persecutionwas only one of the influences which shaped the course and formedthe character of the Ulster Scots. In Ulster, whither they hadoriginally been transplanted by James to found a loyal provincein the midst of the King's enemies, they had done their work toowell and had waxed too powerful for the comfort of latermonarchs. The first attacks upon them struck at their religion;but the subsequent legislative acts which successively ruined thewoolen trade, barred nonconformists from public office, stifledIrish commerce, pronounced non-Episcopal marriages irregular, andinstituted heavy taxation and high rentals for the land theirfathers had made productive--these were blows dealt chiefly forthe political and commercial ends of favored classes in England.

These attacks, aimed through his religious conscience at thesources of his livelihood, made the Ulster Scot perforce what hewas--a zealot as a citizen and a zealot as a merchant no lessthan as a Presbyterian. Thanks to his persecutors, he made areligion of everything he undertook and regarded his civil rightsas divine rights. Thus out of persecution emerged a type of manwho was high-principled and narrow, strong and violent, astenacious of his own rights as he was blind often to the rightsof others, acquisitive yet self-sacrificing, but most of allfearless, confident of his own power, determined to have and tohold.

Twenty thousand Ulstermen, it is estimated, left Ireland forAmerica in the first three decades of the eighteenth century.More than six thousand of them are known to have enteredPennsylvania in 1729 alone, and twenty years later they numberedone-quarter of that colony's population. During the five yearspreceding the Revolutionary War more than thirty thousandUlstermen crossed the ocean and arrived in America just in timeand in just the right frame of mind to return King George'scompliment in kind, by helping to deprive him of his Americanestates, a domain very much larger than the acres of Ulster. Theyfully justified the fears of the good bishop who wrote LordDartmouth, Secretary for the Colonies, that he trembled for thepeace of the King's overseas realm, since these thousands of"phanatical and hungry Republicans" had sailed for America.

The Ulstermen who entered by Charleston were known to theinhabitants of the tidewater regions as the "Scotch-Irish." Thosewho came from the north, lured southward by the offer of cheaplands, were called the "Pennsylvania Irish." Both were, however,of the same race--a race twice expatriated, first from Scotlandand then from Ireland, and stripped of all that it had wonthroughout more than a century of persecution. To these exilesthe Back Country of North Carolina, with its cheap and even freetracts lying far from the seat of government, must have seemednot only the Land of Promise but the Land of Last Chance. Herethey must strike their roots into the sod with such interlockingstrength that no cataclysm of tyranny should ever dislodgethem--or they must accept the fate dealt out to them by theirformer persecutors and become a tribe of nomads and serfs. But tothese Ulster immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. Theyknew themselves strong men, who had made the most of opportunitydespite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their feetalong the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers fromCharleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley,was a conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which laysleeping like an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future.

It is maintained still by many, however often disputed, that theUlstermen were the first to declare for American Independence, asin the Old Country they were the first to demand the separationof Church and State. A Declaration of Independence is said tohave been drawn up and signed in Mecklenburg County, NorthCarolina, on May 20, 1775.* However that maybe, it is certainthat these Mecklenburg Protestants had received special schoolingin the doctrine of independence. They had in their midst foreight years (1758-66) the Reverend Alexander Craighead, aPresbyterian minister who, for his "republican doctrines"expressed in a pamphlet, had been disowned by the PennsylvaniaSynod acting on the Governor's protest, and so persecuted inVirginia that he had at last fled to the North Carolina BackCountry. There, during the remaining years of his life, as thesole preacher and teacher in the settlements between the Yadkinand the Catawba rivers he found willing soil in which to sow theseeds of Liberty.

There was another branch of the Scottish race which helped topeople the Back Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to theiroath made them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War,have been somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed downamong the transplanted clans--who, for the most part, spoke onlyGaelic for a generation and wrote nothing--and latterly recordedby one or two of their descendants, supplies us with all we arenow able to learn of the early coming of the Gaels to Carolina.It would seem that their first immigration to America in smallbands took place after the suppression of the Jacobite rising in1715--when Highlanders fled in numbers also to France--for by1729 there was a settlement of them on the Cape Fear River. Weknow, too, that in 1748 it was charged against Gabriel Johnston,Governor of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, that he had shownno joy over the King's "glorious victory of Culloden" and that"he had appointed one William McGregor, who had been in theRebellion in the year 1715 a Justice of the Peace during the lastRebellion [1745] and was not himself without suspicion ofdisaffection to His Majesty's Government." It is indeed possiblethat Gabriel Johnston, formerly a professor at St. Andrew'sUniversity, had himself not always been a stranger to the kilt.He induced large numbers of highlanders to come to America andprobably influenced the second George to moderate his treatmentof the vanquished Gaels in the Old Country and permit theiremigration to the New World.

In contrast with the Ulstermen, whose secular ideals weredictated by the forms of their Church, these Scots adhered stillto the tribal or clan system, although they, too, in themajority, were Presbyterians, with a minority of RomanCatholics and Episcopalians. In the Scotch Highlands they hadoccupied small holdings on the land under the sway of theirchief, or Head of the Clan, to whom they were bound by blood andfealty but to whom they paid no rentals. The position of the Headof the Clan was hereditary, but no heir was bold enough to stepforward into that position until he had performed some deed ofworth. They were principally herders, their chief stock being thefamous small black cattle of the Highlands. Their wars with eachother were cattle raids. Only in war, however, did the Gael layhands on his neighbor's goods. There were no highwaymen andhousebreakers in the Highlands. No Highland mansion, cot, or barnwas ever locked. Theft and the breaking of an oath, sins againstman's honor, were held in such abhorrence that no one guilty ofthem could remain among his clansmen in the beloved glens. TheseHighlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply andfrugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in allweathers, with no other covering from rain and snow than theirplaidies. It is reported of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leadinghis clan to war in winter time, that his men were divided as tothe propriety of following him further because he rolled asnowball to rest his head upon when he lay down. "Now we despairof victory," they said, "since our leader has become goeffeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!"*

* MacLean, "An Historical Account of the Settlement of ScotchHigh.landers in America."

The "King's glorious victory of Culloden" was followed by apolicy of extermination carried on by the orders and under thepersonal direction of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George atlast restrained his son from his orgy of blood, he offered theGaels their lives and exile to America on condition of theirtaking the full oath of allegiance. The majority accepted histerms, for not only were their lives forfeit but their crops andcattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which theirancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. Thedescriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of thehills and glens they loved with such passionate fervor are amongthe most pathetic in history. Strong men who had met the ravageof a brutal sword without weakening abandoned themselves to theagony of sorrow. They kissed the walls of their houses. Theyflung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon whichthey had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells tothe peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see;and, as they turned their backs and filed down through thepasses, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.

Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race whichentered North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into thewilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Traditionindicates that these hillsmen sought the interior because thegrass and pea vine which overgrew the innercountry stretchingtowards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattlewhich some of the chiefs are said to have brought with them.These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in theYadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years earlier. In1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of Gaels torejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from hisresidence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Someof these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unitewith others of their clan who had been for some time in thatdistrict. The exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkincannot be ascertained, as there were no court records and theoffices of the land companies were not then open for the sale ofthese remote regions. But by 1753 there were not less than fourthousand Gaels in Cumberland County, where they occupied thechief magisterial posts; and they were already spreading over thelands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond, Robeson,Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was ascommonly heard as English.

In the years immediately preceding the Revolution and even in1776 itself they came in increasing numbers. They knew nothing ofthe smoldering fire just about to break into flames in thecountry of their choice, but the Royal Governor, Josiah Martin,knew that Highland arms would soon be ceded by His Majesty. Heknew something of Highland honor, too; for he would not let theGaels proceed after their landing until they had bound themselvesby oath to support the Government of King George. So it was thatthe unfortunate Highlanders found themselves, according too theirstrict code of honor, forced to wield arms against the veryAmericans who had received and befriended them--and for thecrowned brother of a prince whose name is execrated to this dayin Highland song and story!

They were led by Allan MacDonald of Kingsborough; and traditiongives us a stirring picture of Allan's wife--the famous FloraMacDonald, who in Scotland had protected the Young Pretender inhis flight--making an impassioned address in Gaelic to theHighland soldiers and urging them on to die for honor's sake.When this Highland force was conquered by the Americans, thelarge majority willingly bound themselves not to fight furtheragainst the American cause and were set at liberty. Many of themfelt that, by offering their lives to the swords of theAmericans, they had canceled their obligation to King George andwere now free to draw their swords again and, this time, inaccordance with their sympathies; so they went over to theAmerican side and fought gallantly for independence.

Although the brave glory of this pioneer age shines so brightlyon the Lion Rampant of Caledonia, not to Scots alone does thatwhole glory belong. The second largest racial stream which flowedinto the Back Country of Virginia and North Carolina was German.Most of these Germans went down from Pennsylvania and weregenerally called "Pennsylvania Dutch," an incorrect rendering ofPennsylvanische Deutsche. The upper Shenandoah Valley was settledalmost entirely by Germans. They were members of the Lutheran,German Reformed, and Moravian churches. The cause which sent vastnumbers of this sturdy people across the ocean, during the firstyears of the eighteenth century, was religious persecution. Bystatute and by word the Roman Catholic powers of Austria soughtto wipe out the Salzburg Lutherans and the Moravian followers ofJohn Huss. In that region of the Rhine country known in thosedays as the German Palatinate, now a part of Bavaria, Protestantswere being massacred by the troops of Louis of France, thenengaged in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) and in thezealous effort to extirpate heretics from the soil of Europe. In1708, by proclamation, Good Queen Anne offered protection to thepersecuted Palatines and invited them to her dominions. Twelvethousand of them went to England, where they were warmly receivedby the English. But it was no slight task to settle twelvethousand immigrants of an alien speech in England and enable themto become independent and self-supporting. A better solution oftheir problem lay in the Western World: The Germans needed homesand the Queen's overseas dominions needed colonists. They weresettled at first along the Hudson, and eventually many of themtook up lands in the fertile valley of the Mohawk.

For fifty years or more German and Austrian Protestants pouredinto America. In Pennsylvania their influx averaged about fifteenhundred a year, and that colony became the distributing centerfor the German race in America. By 1727, Adam Muller and hislittle company had established the first white settlement in theValley of Virginia. In 1732 Joist Heydt went south from York,Pennsylvania, and settled on the Opequan Creek at or near thesite of the present city of Winchester.

The life of Count Zinzendorf, called "the Apostle," one of theleaders of the Moravian immigrants, glows like a star out ofthose dark and troublous times. Of high birth and gentle nurture,he forsook whatever of ease his station promised him and fittedhimsclf for evangelical work. In 1741 he visited the WyomingValley to bring his religion to the Delawares and Shawanoes. Hewas not of those picturesque Captains of the Lord who bore theirmuskets on their shoulders when they went forth to preach.Armored only with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation,and the sword of the spirit, his feet "shod with the preparationof the gospel of peace," he went out into the country of thesebloodthirsty tribes and told them that he had come to them intheir darkness to teach the love of the Christ which lighteth theworld. The Indians received him suspiciously. One day while hesat in his tent writing, some Delawares drew near to slay him andwere about to strike when they saw two deadly snakes crawl infrom the opposite side of the tent, move directly towards theApostle, and pass harmlessly over his body. Thereafter theyregarded him as under spiritual protection. Indeed so widespreadwas his good fame among the tribes that for some years allMoravian settlements along the borders were unmolested. Paintedsavages passed through on their way to war with enemy bands or toraid the border, but for the sake of one consecrated spirit, whomthey had seen death avoid, they spared the lives and goods of hisfellow believers. When Zinzendorf departed a year later, hismantle fell on David Zeisberger, who lived the love he taughtfor over fifty years and converted many savages. Zeisberger wastaken before the Governor and army heads at Philadelphia, who hadonly too good reason to be suspicious of priestly counsels in thetents of Shem: but he was able to impress white men no less thansimple savages with the nobility of the doctrine he had learnedfrom the Apostle.

In 1751 the Moravian Brotherhood purchased one hundred thousandacres in North Carolina from Lord Granville. Bishop Spangenburgwas commissioned to survey this large acreage, which was situatedin the present county of Forsyth east of the Yadkin, and which ishistorically listed as the Wachovia Tract. In 1753, twelveBrethren left the Moravian settlements of Bethlehem and Nazareth,in Pennsylvania, and journeyed southward to begin the founding ofa colony on their new land. Brother Adam Grube, one of thetwelve, kept a diary of the events of this expedition.*

* This diary is printed in full in "Travels in the AmericanColonies." edited by N. D. Mereness.

Honor to whom honor is due. We have paid it, in some measure, tothe primitive Gaels of the Highlands for their warrior strengthand their fealty, and to the enlightened Scots of Ulster fortheir enterprise and for their sacrifice unto blood that freeconscience and just laws might promote the progress and safeguardthe intercourse of their kind. Now let us take up for a momentBrother Grube's "Journal" even as we welcome, perhaps the moregratefully, the mild light of evening after the flooding sun, oras our hearts, when too strongly stirred by the deeds of men,turn for rest to the serene faith and the naive speech of littlechildren.

The twelve, we learn, were under the leadership of one of theirnumber, Brother Gottlob. Their earliest alarms on the march werenot caused, as we might expect, by anticipations of the paintedCherokee, but by encounters with the strenuous "Irish." One ofthese came and laid himself to sleep beside the Brethren's campfire on their first night out, after they had sung their eveninghymn and eleven had stretched themselves on the earth forslumber, while Brother Gottlob, their leader, hanging his hammockbetween two trees, ascended--not only in spirit--a little higherthan his charges, and "rested well in it." Though the alarmingIrishman did not disturb them, the Brethren's doubts of that racecontinued, for Brother Grube wrote on the 14th of October: "Aboutfour in the morning we set up our tent, going four miles beyondCarl Isles [Carlisle, seventeen miles southwest of Harrisburg] soas not to be too near the Irish Presbyterians. After breakfastthe Brethren shaved and then we rested under our tent....People who were staying at the Tavern came to see what kind offolk we were.... Br Gottlob held the evening service and thenwe lay down around our cheerful fire, and Br Gottlob in hishammock." Two other jottings give us a racial kaleidoscope of thesettlers and wayfarers of that time. On one day the Brethrenbought "some hay from a Swiss," later "some kraut from a Germanwhich tasted very good to us"; and presently "an Englishman cameby and drank a cup of tea with us and was very grateful for it."Frequently the little band paused while some of the Brethren wentoff to the farms along the route to help "cut hay." These kindlyacts were usually repaid with gifts of food or produce.

One day while on the march they halted at a tavern and farm inShenandoah Valley kept by a man whose name Brother Grube wrotedown as "Severe." Since we know that Brother Grube's spelling ofnames other than German requires editing, we venture to hazard aguess that the name he attempted to set down as it sounded to himwas Sevier. And we wonder if, in his brief sojourn, he saw a ladof eight years, slim, tall, and blond, with daring andmischievous blue eyes, and a certain, curve of the lips thatthreatened havoc in the hearts of both sexes when he should be aman and reach out with swift hands and reckless will for hisdesires. If he saw this lad, he beheld John Sevier, later tobecome one of the most picturesque and beloved heroes of the OldSouthwest.

Hardships abounded on the Brethren's journey, but faith and theChristian's joy, which no man taketh from him, met and surmountedthem. "Three and a half miles beyond, the road forked.... Wetook the right hand road but found no water for ten miles. Itgrew late and we had to drive five miles into the night to find astoppingplace." Two of the Brethren went ahead "to seek out theroad" through the darkened wilderness. There were rough hills inthe way; and, the horses being exhausted, "Brethren had to helppush." But, in due season, "Br Nathanael held evening prayer andthen we slept in the care of Jesus," with Brother Gottlob asusual in his hammock. Three days later the record runs: "Towardevening we saw Jeams River, the road to it ran down so very steepa hill that we fastened a small tree to the back of our wagon,locked the wheels, and the Brethren held back by the tree withall their might." Even then the wagon went down so fast that mostof the Brethren lost their footing and rolled and tumbledpell-mell. But Faith makes little of such mishaps: "No harm wasdone and we thanked the Lord that he had so graciously protectedus, for it looked dangerous and we thought at times that it couldnot possibly be done without accident but we got down safely...we were all very tired and sleepy and let the angels be ourguard during the night." Rains fell in torrents, making streamsalmost impassable and drenching the little band to the skin. Thehammock was empty one night, for they had to spend the dark hourstrench-digging about their tent to keep it from being washedaway. Two days later (the 10th of November) the weather clearedand "we spent most of the day drying our blankets and mending anddarning our stockings." They also bought supplies from settlerswho, as Brother Grube observed without irony,

"are glad we have to remain here so long and that it means moneyfor them. In the afternoon we held a little Lovefeast and restedour souls in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, wishing for belovedBrethren in Bethlehem and that they and we might live ever closeto Him.... Nov. 16. We rose early to ford the river. The bankwas so steep that we hung a tree behind the wagon, fastening itin such a way that we could quickly release it when the wagonreached the water. The current was very swift and the lead horseswere carried down a bit with it. The water just missed runninginto the wagon but we came safely to the other bank, whichhowever we could not climb but had to take half the things out ofthe wagon, tie ropes to the axle on which we could pull, help ourhorses which were quite stiff, and so we brought our ark again todry land."

On the evening of the 17th of November the twelve arrived safelyon their land on the "Etkin" (Yadkin), having been six weeks onthe march. They found with joy that, as ever, the Lord hadprovided for them. This time the gift was a deserted cabin,"large enough that we could all lie down around the walls. We atonce made preparation for a little Lovefeast and rejoicedheartily with one another."

In the deserted log cabin, which, to their faith, seemed as oneof those mansions "not built with hands" and descendedmiraculously from the heavens, they held their Lovefeast, whilewolves padded and howled about the walls; and in that Pentacostalhour the tongue of fire descended upon Brother Gottlob, so thathe made a new song unto the Lord. Who shall venture to say it isnot better worth preserving than many a classic?

We hold arrival Lovefeast here In Carolina land,A company of Brethren true, A little Pilgrim-Band,Called by the Lord to be of those Who through the whole world go,To bear Him witness everywhere And nought but Jesus know.

Then, we are told, the Brethren lay down to rest and "Br Gottlobhung his hammock above our heads"--as was most fitting on this ofall nights; for is not the Poet's place always just a littlenearer to the stars?

The pioneers did not always travel in groups. There were familieswho set off alone. One of these now claims our attention, forthere was a lad in this family whose name and deeds were to soundlike a ballad of romance from out the dusty pages of history.This family's name was Boone.

Neither Scots nor Germans can claim Daniel Boone; he was in blooda blend of English and Welsh; in character wholly English. Hisgrandfather George Boone was born in 1666 in the hamlet of Stoak,near Exeter in Devonshire. George Boone was a weaver by trade anda Quaker by religion. In England in his time the Quakers wereoppressed, and George Boone therefore sought information ofWilliam Penn, his co-religionist, regarding the colony which Pennhad established in America. In 1712 he sent his three elderchildren, George, Sarah, and Squire, to spy out the land. Sarahand Squire remained in Pennsylvania, while their brother returnedto England with glowing reports. On August 17, 1717, GeorgeBoone, his wife, and the rest of his children journeyed toBristol and sailed for Philadelphia, arriving there on the 10thof October. The Boones went first to Abingdon, the Quakerfarmers' community. Later they moved to the northwestern frontierhamlet of North Wales, a Welsh community which, a few yearspreviously, had turned Quaker. Sarah Boone married a German namedJacob Stover, who had settled in Oley Township, Berks County. In1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley, or, to beexact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there he livedin his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age ofseventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren,and ten greatgrandchildren, seventy descendants in all--English,German, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish blended into one family ofAmericans.*

* R. G. Thwaites, "Daniel Boone", p. 5.

Among the Welsh Quakers was a family of Morgans. In 1720 SquireBoone married Sarah Morgan. Ten years later he obtained 250 acresin Oley on Owatin Creek, eight miles southeast of the presentcity of Reading; and here, in 1734, Daniel Boone was born, thefourth son and sixth child of Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone.Daniel Boone therefore was a son of the frontier. In hischildhood he became familiar with hunters and with Indians, foreven the red men came often in friendly fashion to hisgrandfather's house. Squire Boone enlarged his farm by thrift. Hecontinued at his trade of weaving and kept five or six loomsgoing, making homespun cloth for the market and his neighbors.

Daniel's father owned grazing grounds several miles north of thehomestead and each season he sent his stock to the range. SarahBoone and her little Daniel drove the cows. From early springtill late autumn, mother and son lived in a rustic cabin alone onthe frontier. A rude dairy house stood over a cool spring, andhere Sarah Boone made her butter and cheese. Daniel, aged ten atthis time, watched the herds; at sunset he drove them to thecabin for milking, and locked them in the cowpens at night.

He was not allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himselfa weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shavedsapling with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expertwas he in the launching of this primitive spear that he easilybrought down birds and small game. When he reached his twelfthyear, his father bought him a rifle; and he soon became a crackshot. A year later we find him setting off on the autumnhunt--after driving the cattle in for the winter-with all thekeenness and courage of a man twice his thirteen years. His rifleenabled him to return with meat for the family and skins to betraded in Philadelphia. When he was fourteen his brother Sammarried Sarah Day, an intelligent young Quakeress who took aspecial interest in her young brother-in-law and taught him "therudiments of three R's."

The Boones were prosperous and happy in Oley and it may bewondered why they left their farms and their looms, both of whichwere profitable, and set their faces towards the Unknown. It isrecorded that, though the Boones were Quakers, they were of ahigh mettle and were not infrequently dealt with by the Meeting.Two of Squire Boone's children married "worldlings"--non-Quakers--and were in consequence "disowned" by the Society. Indefiance of his sect, which strove to make him sever allconnection with his unruly offspring, Squire Boone refused toshut his doors on the son and the daughter who had scandalizedlocal Quakerdom. The Society of Friends thereupon expelled him.This occurred apparently during the winter of 1748-49. In thespring of 1750 we see the whole Boone family (save two sons) withtheir wives and children, their household goods and their stock,on the great highway, bound for a land where the hot heart andthe belligerent spirit shall not be held amiss.

Southward through the Shenandoah goes the Boone caravan. Thewomen and children usually sit in the wagons. The men march aheador alongside, keeping a keen eye open for Indian or other enemyin the wild, their rifles under arm or over the shoulder. SquireBoone, who has done with Quakerdom and is leading all that heholds dear out to larger horizons, is ahead of the line, as wepicture him, ready to meet first whatever danger may assail histribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small stature, withruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in the line,together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded cattleand companioned each other through long months in the cabin onthe frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding in thewagon, though she may have done so, but prefer to picture her,with her tall robust body, her black hair, and her blackeyes--with the sudden Welsh snap in them--walking as sturdily asany of her sons.

If Daniel be beside her, what does she see when she looks at him?A lad well set up but not overtall for his sixteen years,perhaps--for "eye-witnesses" differ in their estimates of DanielBoone's height--or possibly taller than he looks, because hisfigure has the forest hunter's natural slant forward and thedroop of the neck of one who must watch his path sometimes inorder to tread silently. It is Squire Boone's blood which showsin his ruddy face--which would be fair but for its tan--and inthe English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows, and theblue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the blackhair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to hisshoulders. We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated bythis plunge into the Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his greatexplorations and warfare, the discovery of Kentucky? Not at all.This is a boy of sixteen in love with his rifle. He looks aheadto vistas of forest filled with deer and to skies clouded withflocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is happiness enoughfor Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later life, heasked little, if any, more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.

Chapter II. Folkways

These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South markthe first great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thusthe beginnings of the westward movement disclose to us a featurecharacteristic also of the later migrations which flung thefrontier over the Appalachians, across the Mississippi, andfinally to the shores of the Pacific. The pioneers, instead ofmoving westward by slow degrees, subduing the wilderness as theywent, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves beyond, outof contact with the life they had left behind. Thus separated byhundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the morecivilized communities, the conquerors of the first American"West," prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests,"inevitably struck out their own ways of life and developed theirown customs. It would be difficult, indeed, to find anywhere amore remarkable contrast in contemporary folkways than thatpresented by the two great community groups of the South--theinland or piedmont settlements, called the Back Country, and thelowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.

The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon toprove, was not less independent in its ideals than the frontiersociety of the Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone andfeeling. Its leaders were the landed gentry--men of elegance, andnot far behind their European contemporaries in the culture ofthe day. They were rich, without effort, both from theirplantations, where black slaves and indentured servants labored,and from their coastwise and overseas trade. Their battles withforest and red man were long past. They had leisure fordiversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing ofthoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card,cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier.Law and politics drew their soberer minds.

Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneersin the first American "West." There every jewel of promise wasringed round with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer hadpurchased at a nominal price, or the free land he had taken by"tomahawk claim"--that is by cutting his name into the bark of adeadened tree, usually beside a spring--supported a forest oftall trunks and interlacing leafage. The long grass and weedswhich covered the ground in a wealth of natural pasturageharbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and, beingshaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bredswarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured bothmen and cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacksof these pests the settlers were obliged to build large"smudges"--fires of green timber--against the wind. The animalssoon learned to back up into the dense smoke and to move from onegrazing spot to another as the wind changed. But useful as werethe green timber fires that rolled their smoke on the wind tosave the stock, they were at the same time a menace to thepioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that afurther encroachment on their territory had been made by theirmost hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Manyan outpost pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea andland from the old world of persecution to this new country offreedom, dropped from the red man's shot ere he had hewn thethreshold of his home, leaving his wife and children to theunrecorded mercy of his slayer.

Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the firstheat in the battle with the wilderness through massed effortunder wariness. They made their clearings in the forest, builttheir cabins and stockades, and planted their cornfields, whilelookouts kept watch and rifles were stacked within easy reach.Every special task, such as a "raising," as cabin building wascalled, was undertaken by the community chiefly because theIndian danger necessitated swift building and made group actionimperative. But the stanch heart is ever the glad heart. Nothingin this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of thepioneer at his labors. His determined optimism turned danger'sdictation into an occasion for jollity. On the appointed day forthe "raising," the neighbors would come, riding or afoot, to thenewcomer's holding--the men with their rifles and axes, the womenwith their pots and kettles. Every child toddled along, too,helping to carry the wooden dishes and spoons. These free giversof labor had something of the Oriental's notion of the sacredratification of friendship by a feast.

The usual dimensions of a cabin were sixteen by twenty feet. Thetimber for the building, having been already cut, lay athand--logs of hickory, oak, young pine, walnut, or persimmon. Tomake the foundations, the men seized four of the thickest logs,laid them in place, and notched and grooved and hammered theminto as close a clinch as if they had grown so. The wood mustgrip by its own substance alone to hold up the pioneer'sdwelling, for there was not an iron nail to be had in the wholeof the Back Country. Logs laid upon the foundation logs andnotched into each other at the four corners formed the walls;and, when these stood at seven feet, the builders laid paralleltimbers and puncheons to make both flooring and ceiling. Theridgepole of the roof was supported by two crotched trees and theroofing was made of logs and wooden slabs. The crevices of thewalls were packed close with red clay and moss. Lastly, spacesfor a door and windows were cut out. The door was made thick andheavy to withstand the Indian's rush. And the windowpanes? Theywere of paper treated with hog's fat or bear's grease.

When the sun stood overhead, the women would give the welcomecall of "Dinner!" Their morning had not been less busy than themen's. They had baked corn cakes on hot stones, roasted bear orpork, or broiled venison steaks; and--above all and first of all--they had concocted the great "stew pie" without which a raisingcould hardly take place. This was a disputatious mixture of deer,hog, and bear--animals which, in life, would surely havecompanioned each other as ill! It was made in sufficient quantityto last over for supper when the day's labor was done. At supperthe men took their ease on the ground, but with their riflesalways in reach. If the cabin just raised by their efforts stoodin the Yadkin, within sight of the great mountains the pioneerswere one day to cross, perhaps a sudden bird note warning fromthe lookout, hidden in the brush, would bring the builders with aleap to their feet. It might be only a hunting band of friendlyCatawbas that passed, or a lone Cherokee who knew that this wasnot his hour. If the latter, we can, in imagination, see him lookonce at the new house on his hunting pasture, slacken rein for amoment in front of the group of families, lift his hand in signof peace, and silently go his way hillward. As he vanishes intothe shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown wildernessbeyond the mountains, pours its last glow on the roof of thecabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers,subtly, it puts the red touch of the West in the faces of themen--who have just declared, through the building of a cabin,that here is Journey's End and their abiding place.

There were community holidays among these pioneers as well aslabor days, especially in the fruit season; and there wereflower-picking excursions in the warm spring days. Early in Aprilthe service berry bush gleamed starrily along the watercourses,its hardy white blooms defying winter's lingering look. Thisbush--or tree, indeed, since it is not afraid to rear itsslender trunk as high as cherry or crab apple--might well beconsidered emblematic of the frontier spirit in those regionswhere the white silence covers the earth for several months andshuts the lonely homesteader in upon himself. From the pioneertime of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far Northtoday, the service berry is cherished alike by white men andIndians; and the red men have woven about it some of theirprettiest legends. When June had ripened the tree's blue-blackberries, the Back Country folk went out in parties to gatherthem. Though the service berry was a food staple on the frontierand its gathering a matter of household economy, the folk madetheir berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. The women and childrenwith pots and baskets--the young girls vying with each other,under the eyes of the youths, as to who could strip boughs thefastest--plucked gayly while the men, rifles in hand, kept guard.For these happy summer days were also the red man's scalping daysand, at any moment, the chatter of the picnickers might beinterrupted by the chilling war whoop. When that sound was heard,the berry pickers raced for the fort. The wildfruits--strawberries, service berries, cherries, plums, crabapples--were, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer'smeager diet to be left unplucked out of fear of an Indian attack.Another day would see the same group out again. The childrenwould keep closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter ofthe young girls would be more subdued, even if their coquetrylacked nothing of its former effectiveness. Early marriages werethe rule in the Back Country and betrothals were frequentlyplighted at these berry pickings.

As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for usby travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in hisbattles with wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects ofboth wilderness and Indian upon him. His countenance and bearingstill show the European, but the European greatly altered bysavage contact. The red peril, indeed, influenced every side offrontier life. The bands of women and children at theharvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were notthere merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter andlove-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins,for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon hisimmemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greaterevil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of thedreaded palefaces. The Indian peril trained the pioneers toalertness, shaped them as warriors and hunters, suggested thefashion of their dress, knit their families into clans and theclans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in theprotection of each and all and a unit of hate against theircommon enemy.

Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn wereharvested by the Indian with fire. The hardest privationssuffered by farmers and stock were due to the settlers having toflee to the forts, leaving to Indian devastation the crops onwhich their sustenance mainly, depended. Sometimes, fortunately,the warning came in time for the frontiersman to collect hisgoods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live stockand drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. Atothers, the tap of the "express"--as the herald of Indian dangerwas called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whisperedhastily, ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant thatthe Indians had surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.

The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scatteredsettlements. They consisted of cabins, blockhouses, andstockades. A range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. Thewalls on the outside were ten or twelve feet high with roofssloping inward. The blockhouses built at the angles of the fortprojected two feet or so beyond the outer walls of the cabins andstockades, and were fitted with portholes for the watchers andthe marksmen. The entrance to the fort was a large folding gateof thick slabs. It was always on the side nearest the spring. Thewhole structure of the fort was bullet-proof and was erectedwithout an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these fortswithstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they couldnot storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst tocompel a sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwittedby the equally cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silentfeet and perhaps with naked body painted in Indian fashion, woulddrop from the wall under cover of the night, pass among thefoemen to the spring, and return to the fort with water.

Into the pioneer's phrase-making the Indian influence penetratedso that he named seasons for his foe. So thoroughly has the term"Indian Summer," now to us redolent of charm, becomedisassociated from its origins that it gives us a shock to bereminded that to these Back Country folk the balmy days followingon the cold snap meant the season when the red men would comeback for a last murderous raid on the settlements before wintershould seal up the land. The "Powwowing Days" were the mellowdays in the latter part of February, when the red men in councilmade their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether orno they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the treesinto leaf. Even the children at their play acknowledged thered-skinned schoolmaster, for their chief games were a trainingin his woodcraft and in the use of his weapons. Tomahawk-throwingwas a favorite sport because of its gruesome practical purposes.The boys must learn to gauge the tomahawk's revolutions by thedistance of the throw so as to bury the blade in its objective.Swift running and high jumping through the brush and fallentimber were sports that taught agility in escape. The boyslearned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with alog or a forked stick for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrelto keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled witheach other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, andlearned the scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It was part oftheir education to imitate the noises of every bird and beast ofthe forest. So they learned to lure the turkey within range, orby the bleat of a fawn to bring her dam to the rifle. Awell-simulated wolf's howl would call forth a response and soinform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the pack. This forestspeech was not only the language of diplomacy in the huntingseason; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray Indiansput themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls inthe daytime and by owl or wolf notes at night. The frontiersmenused the same means to trick the Indian band into betraying theplace of its ambuscade, or to lure the strays, unwitting, withinreach of the knife.

In that age, before the forests had given place to farms andcities and when the sun had but slight acquaintance with the sod,the summers were cool and the winters long and cold in the BackCountry. Sometimes in September severe frosts destroyed the corn.The first light powdering called "hunting snows" fell in October,and then the men of the Back Country set out on the chase. Theirobject was meat--buffalo, deer, elk, bear-for the winter larder,and skins to send out in the spring by pack-horses to the coastin trade for iron, steel, and salt. The rainfall in NorthCarolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from autumn intoearly winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but wetweather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill.In blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in thesheltered places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew thathis quarry ranged the open woods and the high places. The fairplay of the pioneer held it a great disgrace to kill a deer inwinter when the heavy frost had crusted the deep snow. On thecrust men and wolves could travel with ease, but the deer's sharphoofs pierced through and made him defenseless. Wolves and dogsdestroyed great quantities of deer caught in this way; and menwho shot deer under these conditions were considered no huntsmen.There was, indeed, a practical side to this chivalry of thechase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season; but thetrue hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of his code, for he wouldgo to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts--and he killed manya wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.

The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous.What it lacked of the "whereas" and "inasmuch" of legal ink itmade up in sound hickory. In fact, when we review the activitiesof this solid yet elastic wood in the moral, social, and economicphases of Back Country life, we are moved to wonder if thepioneers would have been the same race of men had they beennurtured beneath a less strenuous and adaptable vegetation! Thehickory gave the frontiersman wood for all implements andfurnishings where the demand was equally for lightness, strength,and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building, hisblock mortars hollowed--by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, hissolid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and soforth. It supplied his magic wand for the searching out ofiniquity in the junior members of his household, and his mostcogent argument, as a citizen, in convincing the slothful, theblasphemous, or the dishonest adult whose errors disturbedcommunal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs. Before he raised stock,the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white liquid, suppliedhim with butter for his corn bread and helped out his store ofbear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of thistree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the redman, whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for hishorses were fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian womenfirst made pohickory butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokeetowns, so we are told, first applied the pohickory rod to thevanity of youth!

A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country ofVirginia or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, whatis, perhaps, after all the perfect home--a place where thepersonal life and the work life are united and where nothingfutile finds space. Every object in the cabin was practical andhad been made by hand on the spot to answer a need. Besides thechairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others made of slabsset on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs served as amovable table; the permanent table was built against the wall,its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built intothe wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattressof pine needles, chaff, or dried moss. In the best light from thegreased paper windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, onwhich the housewife made cloth for the family's garments. Overthe fireplace or beside the doorway, and suspended usually onstags' antlers, hung the firearms and the yellow powderhorns, thelatter often carved in Indian fashion with scenes of the hunt orwar. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons, plates, bowls,and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of largeflat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grindingblock for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring,the men of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskinsto be sent out with the trade caravan, while the women sewed,made moccasins or mended them, in the light of pine knots orcandles of bear's grease. The larger children might be weavingcradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of hickory twigs; andthere would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for scalpingknives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the dayshave come when the red gods whisper their chant of war throughthe young leafage.

The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries,generally settled in national groups, each preserving its ownspeech and its own religion, each approaching frontier lifethrough its own native temperament. And the frontier met each andall alike, with the same need and the same menace, and moldedthem after one general pattern. If the cabin stood in a typicalVirginian settlement where the folk were of English stock, it maybe that the dulcimer and some old love song of the homelandenlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and youngpeople danced the country dances of the homeland and the VirginiaReel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and theirreligion did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on theShenandoah or the upper Yadkin the German tongue clicked awayover the evening dish of kraut or sounded more sedately in aLutheran hymn; while from some herder's but on the lower Yadkinthe wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient four-stringedharp mingled with the Gaelic speech.

Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's waysprevailed, none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whomthe good Moravian Brother called "Severe." There perhaps thefeasting celebrated the nuptials of John Sevier, who was barelypast his seventeenth birthday when he took to himself a wife. Orperhaps the dancing, in moccasined feet on the puncheon flooring,was a ceremonial to usher into Back Country life the newmunicipality John had just organized, for John at nineteen hadtaken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we shallfollow later on, as the architect of the first little governmentsbeyond the mountains.

In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk wassolely of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already becomepossessed of his first compass and was studying its ways. On suchan evening, while the red afterglow lingered, he might be mendinga passing trader's firearms by the fires of the primitive forgehis father had set up near the trading path running fromHillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said by the localnimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than youngDaniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. Andperhaps some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for thenight, kindled the youth's first desire to penetrate themountain-guarded wilderness, for the tales of these Romanies ofcommerce were as the very badge of their free-masonry, and entrymoney at the doors of strangers.

Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountainslooming between the newly built cabin and that western land wherethey and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot ina shining script that time cannot dull, there might sit a groupof stern-faced men, all deep in discussion of some point ofspiritual doctrine or of the temporal rights of men. Yet, inevery cabin, whatever the national differences, the setting wasthe same The spirit of the frontier was modeling out of old claya new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.

It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folkwithout further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy.In the earliest days the settlers were cut off from their churchsystems; the pious had to maintain their piety unaided, except inthe rare cases where a pastor accompanied a group of settlers ofhis denomination into the wilds. One of the first ministers whofared into the Back Country to remind the Ulster Presbyterians oftheir spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh McAden ofPhiladelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatesthardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts,carrying the counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock.Among the Highland settlements the Reverend James Campbell forthirty years traveled about, preaching each Sunday at somegathering point a sermon in both English and Gaelic. A littlelater, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's day there arose asmall school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal andfearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government hadan influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly beoverestimated.

But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery ofborder life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidancefrom other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still theprimal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when theday's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes uponthe frontiersman--all links of contact with his racial pastsevered, at grips with destruction in the contenting of hisneeds--see something more, something larger, than he saw in thelog cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together solelyby his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though thewalls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back tothe earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.

Chapter III. The Trader

The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began thechange of purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route,turning it slowly into the beaten track of communication andcommerce. The settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westwardover the trails which he had blazed for them years before. Theirenduring works are commemorated in the cities and farms whichtoday lie along every ancient border line; but of theirforerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing remains. Let ustherefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who first--toborrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the redtrails of war.

He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty yearsbefore John Findlay,* one of this class of pioneers, led DanielBoone through Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamedthe western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattlegrazed among the deer on the green banks of the old Cherokee(Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer settler beyond the highhills; for he built, in the center of the Indian towns, the firstwhite man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading house--anddwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was America'sfirst magnate of international commerce. His furs--for which hepaid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, andcloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade asthey strode to their council chamber in London to discuss hisbusiness and to pass those regulations which might have seriouslyhampered him but for his resourcefulness in circumventing them!

* The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.

He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off orfell before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interestof the Spanish or French, raided his pack-horse caravans on themarch. Often, too, side by side with the red brothers of hisadoption, he fought in the intertribal wars. His was the firsteducative and civilizing influence in the Indian towns. Heendeavored to cure the Indians of their favorite midsummermadness, war, by inducing them to raise stock and poultry andimprove their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not necessaryto impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical manand he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summercaravans and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.

In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when thecolonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were only a handful, itwas the trader who defeated each successive attempt of French andSpanish agents to weld the tribes into a confederacy for theannihilation of the English settlements. The English trader didhis share to prevent what is now the United States from becominga part of a Latin empire and to save it for a race having theAnglo-Saxon ideal and speaking the English tongue.

The colonial records of the period contain items which, takensingly, make small impression on the casual reader but which,listed together, throw a strong light on the past and bring thatmercenary figure, the trader, into so bold a relief that thedesign verges on the heroic. If we wonder, for instance, why theScotch Highlanders who settled in the wilds at the headwaters ofthe Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were later followed by Welshand Huguenots, met with no opposition from the Indians, themystery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a fewprinted lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives onthe Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought intofriendly alliance with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader. Weread further and learn that the Spaniards in Florida had longendeavored to unite the tribes in Spanish and French territoryagainst the English and that the influence of traders preventedthe consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had prepared to invadeEnglish territory with nine hundred Indians. The plot wasdiscovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends, thetraders, who immediately gathered together five hundred warriors,marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them.Again, when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine,rose against the English in 1715, and the Yamasi Massacreoccurred in South Carolina, it was due to the traders that someof the settlements at least were not wholly unprepared to defendthemselves.

The early English trader was generally an intelligent man;sometimes educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. Heknew the one sure basis on which men of alien blood and farseparated stages of moral and intellectual development can meetin understanding--namely, the truth of the spoken word. Herecognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp and woof ofhuman intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plaininterpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a namefor it. He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave hisconfidence to the man who spoke this speech even in the closebarter for furs.

We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as itwas in the early days of the colonial fur trade, about thebeginning of the eighteenth century. A narrow strip of looselystrung English settlements stretched from the north border of NewEngland to the Florida line. North Florida was Spanish territory.On the far distant southwestern borders of the English colonieswere the southern possessions of France. The French sphere ofinfluence extended up the Mississippi, and thence by way ofrivers and the Great Lakes to its base in Canada on the bordersof New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasitribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns onlysixty or eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St.Augustine. On the west, about the same distance northeast of NewOrleans, in what is now Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creeknation. There French garrisons held Mobile and Fort Alabama. TheCreeks at this time numbered over four thousand warriors. Thelands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger fighting strength,began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and extended alongthe Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast of theChoctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and mostsuccessful warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. TheCherokees, in part seated within the Carolinas, on the uppercourses of the Savannah River, mustered over six thousand men atarms. East of them were the Catawba towns. North of them were theShawanoes and Delawares, in easy communication with the tribes ofCanada. Still farther north, along the Mohawk and other riversjoining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood the "long houses"of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages, the Iroquoisor Six Nations.

The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonistsperhaps ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeededin the conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a redbillow of tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguishedthe English settlements. The French, it is true, made allies ofthe Shawanoes, the Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong factionof the Creeks; and they finally won over the Cherokees aftercourting them for more than twenty years. But the Creeks in part,the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois Confederacy, or SixNations, remained loyal to the English. In both North and Southit was the influence of the traders that kept these red tribes onthe English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir WilliamJohnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders."The Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair;and among the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wieldeda potent influence.

Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in1735 at the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader'scaravan as packhorse boy. A few years later he married a woman ofthe Creeks. On many occasions he defeated French and Spanishplots with the Creeks for the extermination of the colonists inGeorgia and South Carolina. His action in the final war with theFrench (1760), when the Indian terror was raging, is typical.News came that four thousand Creek warriors, reinforced by FrenchChoctaws, were about to fall on the southern settlements. At therisk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader named Galphinhurried from Charleston to their trading house on the Georgiafrontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors,feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won themfrom their purpose. McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander,who about this time became a chief in his mother's nation perhapson this very occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making abrotherhood pact, to send a son to dwell in the brother's house.We shall meet that son again as the Chief of the Creeks and theterrible scourge of Georgia and Tennessee in the dark days of theRevolutionary War.

The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told,would require a book as long as the huge volume written by JamesAdair, the "English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman whoentered the Indian trade in 1785 and launched upon the long anddangerous trail from Charleston to the upper towns of theCherokees, situated in the present Monroe County, Tennessee. Thushe was one of the earliest pioneers of the Old Southwest; and hewas Tennessee's first author. "I am well acquainted," he says,"with near two thousand miles of the American continent"--astatement which gives one some idea of an early trader'senterprise, hardihood, and peril. Adair's "two thousand miles"were twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for himselfthrough uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade,hunting, literature, or war, it pleased him to make solitarytrips of exploration. These seem to have led him chieflynorthward through the Appalachians, of which he must have beenone of the first white explorers.

A many-sided man was James Adair--cultured, for his style suffersnot by comparison with other writers of his day, no stranger toLatin and Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied toassist him in setting forth his ethnological theory that theAmerican Indians were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes ofIsrael. Before we dismiss his theory with a smile, let usremember that he had not at his disposal the data now availablewhich reveal points of likeness in custom, language formation,and symbolism among almost all primitive peoples. The formidabletitle-page of his book in itself suggests an author keenlyobservant, accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatileand substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the townsof the Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother,"but from whose "natural jealousy" and "prying disposition" he wasobliged to conceal his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was aliterary work begun and carried on with more disadvantages!"

Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbinginterest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of Indian life as itwas before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable tothe lover of native lore and to the student of the history ofwhite settlement. The author believes, as he must, in thesupremacy of his own race, but he nevertheless presents theIndians' side of the argument as no man could who had not madehimself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those fiercestruggles which took place along the border; for he shows us thered warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a humancreature with an ideal of his own, albeit an ideal that must giveplace to a better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methodsof battle and inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponderunmoved Adair's description of his preparations for war--thefasting, the abstention from all family intercourse, and thepurification rites and prayers for three days in the house setapart, while the women, who might not come close to their men inthis fateful hour, stood throughout the night till dawn chantingbefore the door. Another poetic touch the author gives us, fromthe Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that theroot, chee-ra, means fire. A Cherokee never extinguished firesave on the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torchinto the water and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed himwere finished." The warrior slain in battle was held to have beenbalanced by death and it was said of him that "he was weighed onthe path and made light." Adair writes that the Cherokees, untilcorrupted by French agents and by the later class of traders whopoured rum among them like water, were honest, industrious, andfriendly. They were ready to meet the white man with theircustomary phrase of good will "I shall firmly shake hands withyour speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.

It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in theAppalachians, that Adair explored the mountains. He describes thepass through the chain which was used by the Indians and which,from his outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap. Herelates many incidents of the struggle with the French--manifestations even in this remote wilderness of the vastconflict that was being waged for the New World by two imperialnations of the Old.

Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of SouthCarolina, the dangerous task of opening up trade with theChoctaws; a tribe mustering upwards of five thousand warriors whowere wholly in the French interest. Their country lay in what isnow the State of Mississippi along the great river, some sevenhundred miles west and southwest of Charleston. After passing thefriendly Creek towns the trail led on for 150 miles through whatwas practically the enemy's country. Adair, owing to what helikes to term his "usual good fortune," reached the Choctawcountry safely and by his adroitness and substantial presents wonthe friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he foundin a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach ofhospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thuscreated a large proEnglish faction among the Choctaws, and hissuccess seriously impaired French prestige with all thesouthwestern tribes. Several times French Choctaws bribed tomurder him, waylaid Adair on the trail--twice when he wasalone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable self-possessionand alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.

Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life,2200 pounds, for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstandingGovernor Glen's agreement with him. And, on his return toCharleston, while the Governor was detaining him "on one pretextor another," he found that a new expedition, which the Governorwas favoring for reasons of his own, had set out to capture hisChickasaw trade and gather in "the expected great crop ofdeerskins and beaver...before I could possibly return to theChikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy traderset out alone.

"In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rainssucceed each other in these climes, so that I partly rode andpartly swam to the Chikkasah country; for not expecting to staylong below [in Charleston] I took no leathern canoe. Many of thebroad, deep creeks...had now overflowed their banks, ran at arapid rate and were unpassable to any but DESPERATE PEOPLE...the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of timber drivingdown the former and the great fallen trees floating in thelatter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woodythickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry onwhich, as a second means, my life depended."

Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal histrade, and later on published the whole story in the Charlestonpress and sent in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, withfrank observations on His Excellency himself. We gather that hisbold disregard of High Personages set all Charleston in anuproar!

Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotespages to prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book ofLeviticus but only a paragraph to an exploit of courage andendurance such as that ride and swim for the Indian trade. Wehave to read between the lines to find the man; but he wellrepays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions that on onetrip he was captured by the French, who were so

"well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them andfeared others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner...in the Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to havesent me down to Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal tobe hanged...BUT I DOUBTED NOT OF BEING ABLE TO EXTRICATEMYSELF SOME WAY OR OTHER. They appointed double centries over mefor some days before I was to be sent down in the French King'slarge boat. They were strongly charged against laying down theirweapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the place where Iwas kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief.... About anhour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them byland.... I took through the middle of the low land coveredwith briers at full speed. I heard the French clattering onhorseback along the path...and the howling savages pursuing...,but MY USUAL GOOD FORTUNE enabled me to leave them farenough behind...."

One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus mightwell have been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from"double centries" and a fortified garrison, and the plungethrough the tangled wilds, by a man without gun or knife orsupplies, and who for days dared not show himself upon the trail.

There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair'snarrative; such luck as his argues for extraordinary resources inthe man. Sometimes we discover only through one phrase on a pagethat he must himself have been the hero of an event he relates inthe third person. This seems to be the case in the affair ofPriber, which was the worst of those "damages" Adair did to theFrench. Priber was "a gentleman of curious and speculativetemper" sent by the French in 1786 to Great Telliko to win theCherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading withthe Cherokees. He relates that Priber,

"more effectually to answer the design of his commission...ate,drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with theIndians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from thenatives,--he married also with them, and being endued with astrong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned theirdialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very illopinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent,avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflatedthe artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their ownimportance in the American scale of power.... Having thusinfected them...he easily formed them into a nominalrepublican government--crowned their old Archimagus emperor aftera pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety ofhigh-sounding titles for all the members of his imperialmajesty's red court."

Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees tothe very great danger of our southern colonies." His position wasthat of Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedlyprovocative arrogance, he carried on correspondence with theBritish authorities. The colonial Government seems, on thisoccasion, to have listened to the traders and to have realizedthat Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to take himprisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands"with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened totake the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and thesoldiers went home without him--to the great hurt of Englishprestige. The Cherokee empire had now endured for five years andwas about to rise "into a far greater state of puissance by theacquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw and the Western MississippiIndians," when fortunately for the history of Britishcolonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."

It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspectsthe modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Sincethe military had failed and the Government dared not again employforce, other means must be found; the trader provided them. TheSecretary with his Cherokee bodyguard journeyed south on hismission to the Creeks. Secure, as he supposed, he lodgedovernight in an Indian town. But there a company of Englishtraders took him into custody, along with his bundle ofmanuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at FortAlabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, whoimprisoned him and kept him out of mischief till he died.

As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such heapproves it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnologicalleanings, however, he deplores it, and hopes that Priber'svaluable manuscripts may "escape the despoiling hands of militarypower." Priber had spent his leisure in compiling a Cherokeedictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled in his winterhouse in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian Appendix tothe Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had exchangednotes, so we gather from Adair's references to conversations andcorrespondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, hadbeen increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquetteon the part of the Secretary: "He told them [the Indians] that inthe very same manner as he was their great Secretary, I was thedevil's clerk, or an accursed one who marked on paper the badspeech of the evil ones of darkness." On his own part Adairadmits that his object in this correspondence was to trap theSecretary into something more serious than literary errata. Thatis, he admits it by implication; he says the Secretary "feared"it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently knew that thescholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was secretlyinciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk thediscoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem,knew that he knew!

Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not thesole cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in alater chapter. The earliest causes were the instigations of theFrench and the rewards which they offered for English scalps. Butequally provocative of Indian rancor were the acts of sometimesmerely stupid, sometimes dishonest, officials; the worst ofthese, Adair considered, was the cheapening of the trade throughthe granting of general licenses.

"Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns....At my first setting out among them, a number of traders...journeyed through our various nations in different companies andwere generally men of worth; of course they would have a livingprice for their goods, which they carried on horseback to theremote Indian countries at very great expences.... [TheIndians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy in theirminds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons dailyinculcated on them...but according to the present unwiseplan, two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one ofthose villages...who are generally the dregs and offscouringsof our climes...by inebriating the Indians with theirnominally prohibited and poisoning spirits, they purchase thenecessaries of life at four and five hundred per cent cheaperthan the orderly traders.... Instead of showing good examplesof moral conduct, beside the other part of life, they instructthe unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical lessons ofobscenity and blasphemy."

In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There isno sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indianchiefs to various officials to stop the importation of liquorinto their country, alleging the debauchment of their young menand warning the white man, with whom they desired to be friends,that in an Indian drink and blood lust quickly combined.

Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to beread by Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of hisreflections on liberty, justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would notsound unworthily today. His sympathies were with "the principlesof our Magna Charta Americana"; but he thought the threateneddivision of the English-speaking peoples the greatest evil thatcould befall civilization. His voluminous work discloses a mannot only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with a senseof commercial values. Yet, instead of making a career forhimself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirtyyears in the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with theexception of some of his older brother traders, he preferred theChickasaw to any other society.

The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expectto find stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of hisbook. The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; theradical, in a temperament that is irked by the superficialitiesthat comprise so large a part of conventional standards. Thereason for his being what he was is almost the only thing Adairdid not analyze in his book. Perhaps, to him, it was self evident.We may let it be so to us, and see it most clearly presented in apicture composed from some of his brief sketches: A land of grassand green shade inset with bright waters, where deer and domesticcattle herded together along the banks; a circling group ofhouses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays,and, within and without, the movement of "a friendly andsagacious people," who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded"their white brother in peace and war, and who conversed dailywith him in the Old Beloved Speech learned first of Nature. "Liketowers in cities beyond the common size of those of the Indians"rose the winter and summer houses and the huge trading housewhich the tribe had built for their best beloved friend in thetown's center, because there he would be safest from attack. Onthe rafters hung the smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in thehunt and prepared for him by his red servants, who were also hiscomrades at home and on the dangerous trail. "Beloved old women"kept an eye on his small sons, put to drowse on panther skins sothat they might grow up brave warriors. Nothing was there ofartifice or pretense, only "the needful things to make areasonable life happy." All was as primitive, naive, andcontented as the woman whose outline is given once in a fewstrokes, proudly and gayly penciled: "I have the pleasure ofwriting this by the side of a Chikkasah female, as great aprincess as ever lived among the ancient Peruvians or Mexicans,and she bids me be sure not to mark the paper wrong after themanner of most of the traders; otherwise it will spoil the makinggood bread or homony!"

His final chapter is the last news of James Adair, type of theearliest trader. Did his bold attacks on corrupt officials andrum peddlers--made publicly before Assemblies and in print--raisefor him a dense cloud of enmity that dropped oblivion on hismemory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his own book is all the historyof him we need. It is the record of a man. He lived a full lifeand served his day; and it matters not that a mist envelops theplace where unafraid he met the Last Enemy, was "weighed on thepath and made light."

Chapter IV. The Passing Of The French Peril

The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrierwhich held back the settler with his plough and his rifle fromfollowing the trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond.Over the hills the French were lords of the land. Thefrontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch andtomahawk of their savage allies. By his own strength alone hecould not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills; so hehalted. But that power, by its unachievable desire to be overlordof two hemispheres, was itself to precipitate events which wouldopen the westward road.

The recurring hour in the cycle of history, when the issue ofAutocracy against Democracy cleaves the world, struck for the menof the eighteenth century as the second half of that centurydawned. In our own day, happily, that issue has been perceived bythe rank and file of the people. In those darker days, as Franceand England grappled in that conflict of systems which culminatedin the Seven Years' War, the fundamental principles at stake wereclear to only a handful of thinking men.

But abstractions, whether clear or obscure, do not causeambassadors to demand their passports. The declaration of warawaits the overt act. Behold, then, how great a matter is kindledby a little fire! The casus belli between France and England inthe Seven Years' War--the war which humbled France in Europe andlost her India and Canada--had to do with a small log fort builtby a few Virginians in 1754 at the Forks of the Ohio River andwrested from them in the same year by a company of Frenchmen fromCanada.

The French claimed the valley of the Ohio as their territory; theEnglish claimed it as theirs. The dispute was of long standing.The French claim was based on discovery; the English claim, onthe seato-sea charters of Virginia and other colonies and ontreaties with the Six Nations. The French refused to admit theright of the Six Nations to dispose of the territory. The Englishwere inclined to maintain the validity of their treaties with theIndians. Especially was Virginia so inclined, for a large shareof the Ohio lay within her chartered domain.

The quarrel had entered its acute phase in 1749, when both therival claimants took action to assert their sovereignty. TheGovernor of Canada sent an envoy, Celoron de Blainville, withsoldiers, to take formal possession of the Ohio for the King ofFrance. In the same year the English organized in Virginia theOhio Company for the colonization of the same country; andsummoned Christopher Gist, explorer, trader, and guide, from hishome on the Yadkin and dispatched him to survey the land.

Then appeared on the scene that extraordinary man, RobertDinwiddie, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, erstwhile citizen ofGlasgow. His correspondence from Virginia during his seven years'tenure of office (1751-58) depicts the man with a vividnesssurpassing paint. He was as honest as the day--as honest as hewas fearless and fussy. But he had no patience; he wanted thingsdone and done at once, and his way was THE way to do them. Peoplewho did not think as he thought didn't THINK at all. On thisdrastic premise he went to work. There was of course continuousfriction between him and the House of Burgesses. Dinwiddie hadall a Scot's native talent for sarcasm. His letters, hisaddresses, perhaps in particular his addresses to the House,bristled with satirical thrusts at his opponents. If he hadspelled out in full all the words he was so eager to write, hewould have been obliged to lessen his output; so he used ashorthand system of his own, peculiar enough to be remarkableeven though abbreviations were the rule in that day. Even thedignity of Kings he sacrificed to speed, and we find "HisMajesty" abbreviated to "H M'y"; yet a smaller luminary known as"His Honor" fares better, losing only the last letter--"HisHono." "Ho." stands for "house" and "yt" for "that," "what,""it," and "anything else," as convenient. Many of his letterswind up with "I am ve'y much fatig'd." We know that he must havebeen!

It was a formidable task that confronted Dinwiddie--to possessand defend the Ohio. Christopher Gist returned in 1751, havingsurveyed the valley for the Ohio Company as far as the Scioto andMiami rivers, and in the following year the survey was ratifiedby the Indians. The Company's men were busy blazing trailsthrough the territory and building fortified posts. But theFrench dominated the territory. They had built and occupied withtroops Fort Le Boeuf on French Creek, a stream flowing into theAllegheny. We may imagine Dinwiddie's rage at this violation ofBritish soil by French soldiers and how he must have sputtered tothe young George Washington, when he summoned that officer andmade him the bearer of a letter to the French commander at FortLe Boeuf, to demand that French troops be at once withdrawn fromthe Ohio.

Washington made the journey to Fort Le Boeuf in December, 1753,but the mission of course proved fruitless. Dinwiddie then wroteto London urging that a force be sent over to help the coloniesmaintain their rights and, under orders from the Crown, suggestedby himself, he wrote to the governors of all the other coloniesto join with Virginia in raising troops to settle the ownershipof the disputed territory. From Governor Dobbs of North Carolinahe received an immediate response. By means of logic, sarcasm,and the entire force of his prerogatives, Dinwiddie secured fromhis own balking Assembly 10,000 pounds with which to raisetroops. From Maryland he obtained nothing. There were threeprominent Marylanders in the Ohio Company, but--or because ofthis--the Maryland Assembly voted down the measure for a militaryappropriation. On June 18, 1754, Dinwiddie wrote, with unusuallyfull spelling for him:

"I am perswaded had His Majesty's Com'ds to the other Coloniesbeen duely obey'd, and the necessary Assistance given by them,the Fr. wou'd have long ago have been oblig'd entirely to haveevacuated their usurp'd Possession of the King's Lands, insteadof w'ch they are daily becoming more formidable, whilst everyGov't except No. Caro. has amus'd me with Expectations that haveproved fruitless, and at length refuse to give any Supply, unlessin such a manner as must render it ineffectual."

This saddened mood with its deliberate penmanship did not lastlong. Presently Dinwiddie was making a Round Robin of himself inanother series of letters to Governors, Councilors, andAssemblymen, frantically beseeching them for "H. M'y's hono." andtheir own, and, if not, for "post'r'ty," to rise against thecruel French whose Indians were harrying the borders again and"Basely, like Virmin, stealing and carrying off the helplessinfant"--as nice a simile, by the way, as any Sheridan ever putinto the mouth of Mrs. Malaprop.

Dinwiddie saw his desires thwarted on every hand by the selfishspirit of localism and jealousy which was more rife in America inthose days than it is today. Though the phrase "capitalistic war"had not yet been coined, the great issues of English civilizationon this continent were befogged, for the majority in thecolonies, by the trivial fact that the shareholders in the OhioCompany stood to win by a vigorous prosecution of the war and tolose if it were not prosecuted at all. The irascible Governor,however, proceeded with such men and means as he could obtain.

And now in the summer of 1754 came the "overt act" whichprecipitated the inevitable war. The key to the valley of theOhio was the tongue of land at the Forks, where the Allegheny andthe Monongahela join their waters in the Beautiful River. Thissite--today Pittsburgh--if occupied and held by either nationwould give that nation the command of the Ohio. Occupied it wasfor a brief hour by a small party of Virginians, under CaptainWilliam Trent; but no sooner had they erected on the spot a crudefort than the French descended upon them. What happened then allthe world knows: how the French built on the captured site theirgreat Fort Duquesne; how George Washington with an armed force,sent by Dinwiddie to recapture the place, encountered French andIndians at Great Meadows and built Fort Necessity, which he wascompelled to surrender; how in the next year (1755) GeneralBraddock arrived from across the sea and set out to take FortDuquesne, only to meet on the way the disaster called "Braddock'sDefeat"; and how, before another year had passed, the SevenYears' War was raging in Europe, and England was allied with theenemies of France.

>From the midst of the debacle of Braddock's defeat rises thefigure of the young Washington. Twenty-three he was then, talland spare and hardbodied from a life spent largely in the open.When Braddock fell, this Washington appeared. Reckless of theenemy's bullets, which spanged about him and pierced his clothes,he dashed up and down the lines in an effort to rally thepanic-stricken redcoats. He was too late to save the day, but notto save a remnant of the army and bring out his own Virginians ingood order. Whether among the stay-at-homes and voters of creditsthere were some who would have ascribed Washington's conduct onthat day to the fact that his brothers were large shareholders inthe Ohio Company and that Fort Duquesne was their personalproperty or "private interest," history does not say. We maysuppose so.

North Carolina, the one colony which had not "amus'd" theGovernor of Virginia "with Expectations that proved fruitless,"had voted 12,000 pounds for the war and had raised two companiesof troops. One of these, under Edward Brice Dobbs, son ofGovernor Dobbs, marched with Braddock; and in that company aswagoner went Daniel Boone, then in his twenty-second year. OfBoone's part in Braddock's campaign nothing more is recorded savethat on the march he made friends with John Findlay, the trader,his future guide into Kentucky; and that, on the day of thedefeat, when his wagons were surrounded, he escaped by slashingthe harness, leaping on the back of one of his horses, anddashing into the forest.

Meanwhile the southern tribes along the border were comparativelyquiet. That they well knew a colossal struggle between the twowhite races was pending and were predisposed to ally themselveswith the stronger is not to be doubted. French influence had longbeen sifting through the formidable Cherokee nation, which still,however, held true in the main to its treaties with the English.It was the policy of the Governors of Virginia and North Carolinato induce the Cherokees to enter strongly into the war as alliesof the English. Their efforts came to nothing chiefly because ofthe purely local and suicidal Indian policy of Governor Glen ofSouth Carolina. There had been some dispute between Glen andDinwiddie as to the right of Virginia to trade with theCherokees; and Glen had sent to the tribes letters calculated tosow distrust of all other aspirants for Indian favor, evenpromising that certain settlers in the Back Country of NorthCarolina should be removed and their holdings restored to theIndians. These letters caused great indignation in NorthCarolina, when they came to light, and had the worst possibleeffect upon Indian relations. The Indians now inclined their earto the French who, though fewer than the English, were at leastunited in purpose.

Governor Glen took this inauspicious moment to hold high festivalwith the Cherokees. It was the last year of his administrationand apparently he hoped to win promotion to some higher post byshowing his achievements for the fur trade and in the matter ofnew land acquired. He plied the Cherokees with drink and inducedthem to make formal submission and to cede all their lands to theCrown. When the chiefs recovered their sobriety, they were filledwith rage at what had been done, and they remembered how theFrench had told them that the English intended to make slaves ofall the Indians and to steal their lands. The situation wascomplicated by another incident. Several Cherokee warriorsreturning from the Ohio, whither they had gone to fight for theBritish, were slain by frontiersmen. The tribe, in accordancewith existing agreements, applied to Virginia for redress--butreceived none.

There was thus plenty of powder for an explosion. GovernorLyttleton, Glen's successor, at last flung the torch into themagazine. He seized, as hostages, a number of friendly chiefs whowere coming to Charleston to offer tokens of good will and forcedthem to march under guard on a military tour which the Governorwas making (1759) with intent to overawe the savages. When thisexpedition reached Prince George, on the upper waters of theSavannah, the Indian hostages were confined within the fort; andthe Governor, satisfied with the result of his maneuver departedsouth for Charleston. Then followed a tragedy. Some Indianfriends of the imprisoned chiefs attacked the fort, and thecommander, a popular young officer, was treacherously killedduring a parley. The infuriated frontiersmen within the fort fellupon the hostages and slew them all--twenty-six chiefs--and theIndian war was on.

If all were to be told of the struggle which followed in the BackCountry, the story could not be contained in this book. Manybrave and resourceful men went out against the savages. We canafford only a passing glance at one of them. Hugh Waddell ofNorth Carolina was the most brilliant of all the frontierfighters in that war. He was a young Ulsterman from County Down,a born soldier, with a special genius for fighting Indians,although he did not grow up on the border, for he arrived inNorth Carolina in 1753, at the age of nineteen. He was appointedby Governor Dobbs to command the second company which NorthCarolina had raised for the war, a force of 450 rangers toprotect the border counties; and he presently became the mostconspicuous military figure in the colony. As to his personality,we have only a few meager details, with a portrait that suggestsplainly enough those qualities of boldness and craft whichcharacterized his tactics. Governor Dobbs appears to have had aspecial love towards Hugh, whose family he had known in Ireland,for an undercurrent of almost fatherly pride is to be found inthe old Governor's reports to the Assembly concerning Waddell'sexploits.

The terror raged for nearly three years. Cabins and fields wereburned, and women and children were slaughtered or dragged awaycaptives. Not only did immigration cease but many hardy settlersfled from the country. At length, after horrors indescribable andgreat toll of life, the Cherokees gave up the struggle. Theirtowns were invaded and laid waste by imperial and colonialtroops, and they could do nothing but make peace. In 1761 theysigned a treaty with the English to hold "while rivers flow andgrasses grow and sun and moon endure."

In the previous year (1760) the imperial war had run its coursein America. New France lay prostrate, and the English weresupreme not only on the Ohio but on the St. Lawrence and theGreat Lakes. Louisbourg, Quebec, Montreal, Oswego, Niagara,Duquesne, Detroit--all were in English hands.

Hugh Waddell and his rangers, besides serving with distinction inthe Indian war, had taken part in the capture of Fort Duquesne.This feat had been accomplished in 1758 by an expedition underGeneral Forbes. The troops made a terrible march over a newroute, cutting a road as they went. It was November when theyapproached their objective. The wastes of snow and theirdiminished supplies caused such depression among the men that theofficers called a halt to discuss whether or not to proceedtoward Fort Duquesne, where they believed the French to beconcentrated in force. Extravagant sums in guineas were named assuitable reward for any man who would stalk and catch a FrenchIndian and learn from him the real conditions inside the fort.The honor, if not the guineas, fell to John Rogers, one ofWaddell's rangers. From the Indian it was learned that the Frenchhad already gone, leaving behind only a few of their number. Asthe English drew near, they found that the garrison had blown upthe magazine, set fire to the fort, and made off.

Thus, while New France was already tottering, but nearly twoyears before the final capitulation at Montreal, the Englishagain became masters of the Ohio Company's land--masters of theForks of the Ohio. This time they were there to stay. Where thewalls of Fort Duquesne had crumbled in the fire Fort Pitt was torise, proudly bearing the name of England's Great Commoner whohad directed English arms to victory on three continents.

With France expelled and the Indians deprived of their whiteallies, the westward path lay open to the pioneers, even thoughthe red man himself would rise again and again in vain endeavorto bar the way. So a new era begins, the era of exploration fordefinite purpose, the era of commonwealth building. In enteringon it, we part with the earliest pioneer--the trader, who firstopened the road for both the lone home seeker and the great landcompany. He dwindles now to the mere barterer and so--save for afew chance glimpses--slips out of sight, for his brave days asImperial Scout are done.

Chapter V. Boone, The Wanderer

What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning fromBraddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture.Perhaps he was planning a career of soldiering, for in lateryears he was to distinguish himself as a frontier commander inboth defense and attack. Or it may be that his heart was full ofthe wondrous tales told him by the trader, John Findlay, of thatHunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where buffalo and deer roamed inthousands. Perhaps he meant to set out ere long in search of thegreat adventure of his dreams, despite the terrible dangers oftrail making across the zones of war into the unknown.

However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of thesepossible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for adifferent adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from histhreshold, was offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazardsto the daring. He was twenty-two, strong and comely and a wholeman; and therefore he was in no mind to refuse what life held outto him in the person of Rebecca Bryan. Rebecca was the daughterof Joseph Bryan, who had come to the Yadkin from Pennsylvaniasome time before the Boones; and she was in her seventeenth year.

Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours haveendeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy,the romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which historyhas omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter,walking abroad in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca'slarge dark eyes shining in the dusk of the forest, mistook themfor a deer's eyes and shot--his aim on this occasion fortunatelybeing bad! But if Boone's rifle was missing its mark at tenpaces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs the storyconcocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorantalike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of aman with a maid in a primitive world.

Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. SquireBoone, in his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot;and in a small cabin built upon his spacious lands the youngcouple set up housekeeping. Here Daniel's first two sons wereborn. In the third year of his marriage, when the second childwas a babe in arms, Daniel removed with his wife and their youngand precious family to Culpeper County in eastern Virginia, forthe border was going through its darkest days of the French andIndian War. During the next two or three years we find him inVirginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season; butback on the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding indefense against the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his fathera lot on Sugar Tree Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (DavieCounty, North Carolina) and built thereon a cabin for himself.The date when he brought his wife and children to live in theirnew abode on the border is not recorded. It was probably sometime after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone himself duringthese years we have but scant information. We hear of him againin Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse caravan whichbrought into the Back Country the various necessaries for thesettlers. We know, too, that in the fall of 1760 he was on a lonehunting trip in the mountains west of the Yadkin; for until a fewyears ago there might be seen, still standing on the banks ofBoone's Creek (a small tributary of the Watauga) in easternTennessee, a tree bearing the legend, "D Boon cilled A BAR onthis tree 1760." Boone was always fond of carving his exploits ontrees, and his wanderings have been traced largely by hisarboreal publications. In the next year (1761) he went withWaddell's rangers when they marched with the army to the finalsubjugation of the Cherokee.

That Boone and his family were back on the border in the newcabin shortly after the end of the war, we gather from the factthat in 1764 he took his little son James, aged seven, on one ofhis long hunting excursions. From this time dates the intimatecomradeship of father and son through all the perils of thewilderness, a comradeship to come to its tragic end ten yearslater when, as we shall see, the seventeen-year-old lad fellunder the red man's tomahawk as his father was leading the firstsettlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights of the open camp,as Daniel and James lay under the frosty stars, the father keptthe boy warm snuggled to his breast under the broad flap of hishunting shirt. Sometimes the two were away from home for monthstogether, and Daniel declared little James to be as good awoodsman as his father.